• • News Flash

  Girls warned not to play didgeridoo

  September 4, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  Squarely in the category of “I don’t know what to think about this”. From Boing Boing:
  

  
  The Victorian Aboriginal Education Association has called for the Australian edition of The Daring Book for Girls to be pulped because it teaches girls how to pay the didgeridoo. The organization says women who play the instrument will be cursed with infertility.
  

  

  “The section on the didgeridoo was ‘part of a general ignorance that mainstream Australia has about Aboriginal culture,’ the association’s general manager Mark Rose told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

  ‘We know very clearly that there’s a range of consequences for a female touching a didgeridoo — infertility would be the start of it, ranging to other consequences,’ he said, adding: ‘I won’t even let my daughter touch one.’”
  

  Full article at AFP.
  

• • Geek Chic

  iTunes U

  August 28, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  The iTunes franchise has quietly launched a totally free new section in their store, nestled between Podcasts and iPod Games.

  It’s called iTunes U, and it contains (free) video and (free) audio courtesy of major universities, PBS and cultural institutions (like MoMA), effectively allowing you to sit in on classes and conferences all over the US. University of California Berkeley in particular has a huge selection of lectures posted.

  Meet iTunes U.

  It might be the robber baron business model, but for now I’m giving them three gold stars.

  Have you tried it? Is iTunes U the new Wikipedia for time suckage?
  

• • Wired Wednesdays

  MyNetiquette

  August 27, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  (Someday soon, Apple will teach us how to construct whole books out of one long amalgamated word.)

  Sure, the word “etiquette” does bring to mind a world of doilies and curtsies. But that frilly frouffy word and what it represents can be the soft oreo centre between us crusty cookies.

  We’re all squished up against each other on this tiny little interweb. And everybody’s got peeves (maybe the word “interweb” is one of them). What follows are some of mine. Or rather, not just a list of my peeves, but my peeves metamorphosed into a few of my personal rules for navigating this big bad abstracted world.
  
  1. Remember the human
  This phrasing is taken from elsewhere (though I forget where). And if I were going to rely on only one rule, this would be it.

  The internet gives people anonymity, and people behave differently when they’re anonymous. You can’t even get anyone to come out to this lecture anymore, because we all think we know it off by heart.

  And yet.

  (more inside…)

• • Wired Wednesdays

  GG: PixelJunk Eden

  August 13, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  From time to time here we discuss the less savoury videogames, and as an avid recreational casual sometime gamer, I think it’s important to also share some of the good stuff.

  Like… PixelJunk Eden!
  

  

  Or, as it is known in our house, “Jump jump!”

  As in —
  Husband gets home. Shoes still on, bag still packed.
  Me: “Hi! Jump jump?”
  Him: “Sure sweetie we can play Eden, just let me…”
  Me: “Jump jump!”
  Him: “Yeah, of course, I just want to…”
  Me: “JUMP. JUMP.”

  (more inside…)

• • Body Politics

  Exermacise.

  August 8, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  I love exercising.

  Well, okay, I don’t love it. I like it. Except for the times when I’ve hated it.

  While I was on the treadmill this morning I was thinking about the complexities of my relationship with exercise. Informal surveys make me think I’m definitely not the only one, so I thought I’d say what it’s been like for me, and throw it out to the Shameless folk.

  I was not an athletic kid. Not that I didn’t like being physical, but I was definitely in the group that didn’t play sports on the side, and so was pretty fux0red when it came to gym class (why, why call it a class if there’s no instruction?).

  I will forever remember my grade 4 teacher fondly for coming over in volleyball (one of my most feared activities), and showing me how to serve. It took 2 minutes, and it changed every volleyball class that followed. Because it wasn’t that I couldn’t. It was that I didn’t have the first clue how. It turned out that I actually had a pretty decent serve now that I knew what I was doing. I was still ass at every other position, but it was the first taste of enjoyment in a long dry spell of suck.
  
  Fast forward past the rest of the not-so-sweet torment that was elementary school gym, through high school where I injured my back (permanently) doing some sort of flip over a pommel horse during our gymnastics component(?!). Again with no instruction. Who thought it was a good idea to make gymnastics part of a general amateur curriculum? “Okay, uneven bars, aaaaand… go!” ACK!

  So I was 18 before I realized that I actually like exercise.
  (more inside…)

• • News Flash

  Yep, that’s why I hate reading the news.

  July 31, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  Sexual harassment okay as it ensures humans breed, Russian judge rules

  “The unnamed executive, a 22-year-old from St Petersburg, had been hoping to become only the third woman in Russia’s history to bring a successful sexual harassment action against a male employer.

  She alleged she had been locked out of her office after she refused to have intimate relations with her 47-year-old boss.

  “He always demanded that female workers signalled to him with their eyes that they desperately wanted to be laid on the boardroom table as soon as he gave the word,” she earlier told the court. “I didn’t realise at first that he wasn’t speaking metaphorically.”

  The judge said he threw out the case not through lack of evidence but because the employer had acted gallantly rather than criminally.

  “If we had no sexual harassment we would have no children,” the judge ruled.
  
  …

  According to a recent survey, 100 per cent of female professionals said they had been subjected to sexual harassment by their bosses, 32 per cent said they had had intercourse with them at least once and another seven per cent claimed to have been raped.”

  
  ~from Telegraph.co.uk and Foreign Policy blog

• • Wired Wednesdays

  Bevels, bytes and boobs.

  July 30, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  Fresh off of watching Helvetica (and then watching it again — big thanks to Lex), I enjoyed this recent post at Logo Design Love (once again via Google Reader rec).

  
  “It’s becoming more and more difficult to execute original logo designs. No matter how clever your idea, the chances are someone has created a very similar logo. Why is that? We’re all surrounded by the same influences, exposed to the same shapes, forms and patterns. With the importance of branding in the marketplace, and thousands of designers working on similar projects, it’s obvious ideas will, from time-to-time, look almost identical.”

  You can see what they mean (I knew Columbia Sportswear reminded me of something):

  Wayback Machine and Google Blogoscoped
  

  

  Sun Microsystems and Columbia Sportswear
  

  

  Many more logos and logo-a-likes here.

  And now some bonus material. Including: a breast massaging robot, a face-stealing robot, and mad Mac speculationing.

  (more inside…)

• • Body Politics

  Condoms cause death: an unconscientious objection

  July 21, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  This is a poster put up in Dar Es Salaam by the Roman Catholic organization Human Life International, who “exist… to fight the evils of abortion, contraception, sex education and family breakdown”.

  

  From Elizabeth Pisani’s site:
  

  “Condoms lead to death, apparently. Since one in 10 adults in Dar is infected with HIV, you might think it more likely that unprotected sex leads to death. But perhaps to the Catholic fundamentalist who put up the posters, passing on a fatal virus is preferable to the sin of using contraception.

  At the time, I wrote that “The Condoms = Death campaign … marks a shift in rhetoric from anti-abortion to anti-contraception among a small but vocal core of conservatives in the United States. Unless something is done about it very soon, that shift is going to be imposed on millions of women and men across the globe.

  It now looks like the first victims might be women on the home front. Under new regulations proposed by the US Department of Health and Human Services, many popular forms of hormonal and indeed mechanical contraception can be re-defined as abortion. And the legislation allows people who work in tax-funded clinics to refuse to provide those contraceptive services if it offends their delicate religious sensibilities. So much for separation of church and state.”

• • Laugh Track

  Jonesing for Joss?

  July 17, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  Since there’s always big Joss love shown on this blog, I thought y’all would appreciate this.

  A relatively under-the-radar Joss Whedon project: “Dr Horrible’s Sing-Along Blog”

  Featuring Neil Patrick Harris, Nathan Fillion, and Felicia Day.

  Think Felicia Day looks familiar? Picture her with shorter hair, maybe in a group, say, of young women with ‘potential’…
  (more inside…)

• • Wired Wednesdays

  Whose font are you?

  July 16, 2008 • Catherine Hayday

  I’m a low-level typography geek. I love reading the “About this Typeface” description at the back of a book*, and a manuscript or website using the default font just isn’t finished yet.

  “Typography is what language looks like.”

  Cameron Adams gets meta on type with his recent post on the handwriting of type designers (via Slashdot, via Google Reader Rec). And I love a bit of meta me.
  

  “Hit pause for a moment and consider how greatly we – people in the digital age – are indebted to typographers. Almost all of our visual communication is delivered using the products of their craft: newspapers, SMSes, instant messages, emails, web pages, signs, posters, billboards; the list of purposes is endless.

  In these days where looping strokes have been replaced by keyboard clickety-clack, typographers define the style and tone of our missives. Would you like to be elegant, modern, childish or … disturbed? Then you can choose between Garamond, Montag, Comic Sans, Zebraflesh, and a thousand more.
  …
  The handwriting of typographers intrigues me because it raises so many questions, big and small: Do typographers exert some extraordinary control of the pen that laypersons don’t? Does a typographer’s handwriting influence the typefaces they produce? Has the rise of digital communications made handwriting redundant? Do modern typographers, born of digital tools, lack the finesse of their more wizened counterparts? If so, does that change the way their type is designed?”

  Personally, I’m a fan of Garamond. Palatino and Helvetica Neue Condensed Bold are elegant. And I think if you’re using Comic Sans in anything other than a comic, it’s a cry for help.
  (more inside…)

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